1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a method and apparatus for encoding and decoding multi-view video data and, more specifically, to a method and apparatus for encoding and decoding multi-view video data using correlation information between different views based on a stitched image.
2. Description of Related Art
In general, multi-view video processing technology refers to technology for compressing, uncompressing, synthesizing, and playing multi-view video data that are captured by a plurality of cameras at the same time. The multi-view video processing technology provides more realistic images and cubic effect to the human, so that it begins to be used in various application fields. However, the multi-view video image set having a set of N view images (N>=2) has N times of data compared with the existing video having one view, so that a signal bandwidth should be significantly larger than that of the conventional image processing system.
With respect to this, based on the fact that each view image of the multi-view image set has region overlapped with other view image, which may be referred to “overlapped region” a technology for compressing image data using correlation information on the overlapped regions has been largely developed.
One such multi-view video encoding technology is to encode multi-view video data by expanding MPEG-2 MVP (multi-view profile) and MPEG-4 TS (Temporal Scalability) encoding technology largely used in encoding stereoscopic video data, which is disclosed in Korean Patent Application No. 10-2003-0002116 entitled to “APPARATUS AND METHOD OF COMPRESSING AND UNCOMPRESSING MULTI-VIEW IMAGE” filed on Jan. 13, 2003, and Korean Patent Application No. 10-2003-83285 entitled to “APPARATUS OF ENCODING MULTI-VIEW VIDEO IMAGE” filed on Oct. 30, 2003. In the video encoding technology disclosed in the documents described above, disparity information, or correlation information between different views, and motion information, or correlation information on the time axis are used to perform encoding, thereby improving compression efficiency. However, there is a problem in that it is impossible to restore only a portion of multi-view images. In addition, when only one error occurs in transmitting encoded streams, the error affects video image data for all views.